


Stalking Is Such A Harsh Word

by JTHM_Michi



Series: Stalking Verse aka Earth AU [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Child Abuse, Families of Choice, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 06:14:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7255771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JTHM_Michi/pseuds/JTHM_Michi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An Earth AU where Ahsoka Tano is a teenager with an abusive father and Anakin is the college kid who decides he wants a little sister. </p><p>Originally posted on my tumblr, I cleaned it up and added a few little things here and there to post it here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stalking Is Such A Harsh Word

She was young when it first started happening. Young enough that her mother was still in the picture, young enough that just a little more pressure behind a swat hurt more than it would have usually. She thinks sometimes, in the back of her mind, that it started as an accident perhaps. He didn’t mean to hit her so hard, misjudged his strength and her fragility, and then when he realized how much it hurt her he felt powerful again. In control.

Or maybe it wasn’t an accident and she’s just lying to herself.

She grows up poor and bruised, angry and sad. She gets in fights at school and cowers at home. The only touch she knows for years is rough and painful. She comes to school with bruised ribs, black eyes, cut lips, and no one seems to care. So she steels herself and lashes out because if they don’t care about her, she won’t care about them.

Then she meets Anakin.

He’s in college and she’s a freshman in high school and by all accounts they shouldn’t have met at all. But she gets into an argument in the public library and he’s the one that tells them off for being ridiculous. The other girl takes a swing at her and before she can dodge, Anakin catches the girl’s fist and snarls at her. Like a wolf. Ahsoka likes wolves.

* * *

 

She’s not ashamed to admit that she gets a bit of a crush on him after that, starts coming to the library after classes to see him. He studies all sorts of things – politics, constitutional law, history of revolutions, engineering, feminism, psychology, and those are only the texts she catches him pulling from the shelves. She does her homework within the first hour or so and then spends the rest of the time watching him – she manages to read a few books on her to-read list too, just to make it less creepy.

He takes notes on the stuff he reads, sometimes has a laptop with him and chews on jerky while typing. Sometimes he puts earphones in, sometimes not. She’s sat behind him and listened to him murmur lyrics to himself, his voice smooth and nice. She thinks he’d probably sound good if he actually sang along with the songs – some of them she knows from the radio but some of them aren’t even in English.

Seeing him after school is the thing she most looks forward to. At home, when her father shouts at her and throws things at her, she thinks of Anakin bobbing his head to unheard music and typing on his laptop, chewing on jerky. At school, when a teacher singles her out in class for not understanding a question, she thinks of the way his hair curls around his ears. She doesn’t know his name yet, but it’s comforting just watching him.

She leaves her house on a Saturday morning, tears on her face that she wipes away furiously, and goes to the library. She’s never been able to come on a Saturday before, always been too scared to leave her house against her father’s wishes, but he threw a bottle at her and yelled at her to get out so she got out. He’s not there and she doesn’t know why that hurts so much. She sits at the table he usually occupies and plays with her phone, draining the battery till it dies in her hands, and only leaves when the library starts to close up for the night.

She returns to school Monday with a cut open lip and a bruise along her upper left arm. She gets detention for being late because she missed the bus and had to walk. She would have just gotten a pink slip if not for the fact that she was tired, hungry, and pissed off so she snapped ‘I’m here aren’t I, be glad I bothered to show up at all!’ By the time she gets to the library, she can’t find him at all and thinks she missed him. On Mondays he sometimes leaves early, she thinks he might have a job or perhaps an afternoon class – hell, for all she knows maybe a girlfriend. (Or a nice family that he lives with, that wants to see him, and that he wants to see. Maybe they have family dinners on Mondays for all she knows.

Maybe he plays soccer or swims and needs to go to classes. Maybe he’s a gymnast or a dancer. Maybe he goes grocery shopping. Or maybe he just wants a few hours to play video games by himself.)

She hunches in a chair near the in-building café and startles when a drink is dropped in front of her, followed by the chair across from her being pulled out and Anakin dropping into it. He grins at her, leaning back in the chair and looking her over. He has a scar above his right eye that she’s never seen this close before, an angry looking jagged thing that speaks of some story she thinks she wants to know. It looks like the scar she has right above her right kneecap, from the time her father threw her against the coffee table one night. She tries not to blush and thinks she fails.

“I’m Anakin; you’ve been watching me for about three weeks now so I figured you should at least know my name. And that’s hot chocolate, by the way, figured I’d get you a drink, make this less awkward.”

She wants to die of mortification. He pulls out a book and starts taking notes, like they planned this, like he didn’t just bust her creepy, stalker-y ass in the most spectacular way.

“I’m Ahsoka.” She mutters into her hands, wanting the ground to swallow her up.

“Nice to meet you.” He says and that’s that.

They actually do plan these things after that. He never asks her why she watches him, just tells her when he’ll be at the library and offers to help her with her homework. Her grades have been steadily improving since she started this and they get better when she pulls out her algebra homework and he puts down his book to explain an equation to her. She actually understands math for the first time since grade school!

He lets her listen to his music and it’s a mess of genres – eclectic doesn’t even begin to describe it. He tells her that some of the music is in Farsi, others in German, a few in Russian, and then he has a truly amazing amount of Japanese rock music and Korean pop. She didn’t know Farsi was an actual language until she met Anakin and isn’t sure if she’s ashamed at her ignorance or just annoyed. He speaks three languages and is learning Russian and she can barely get a passing grade in English.

The weather gets colder. Anakin changes from some far off good thing to a particularly goofy, often nerdy friend she only gets to see for a few hours every day. She still gets detentions for mouthing off, but she just blows them off to go see him. She sees him eye her injuries sometimes with pressed lips, but he doesn’t say anything about them to her and she’s so thankful she wants to hug him. Or maybe hit him, she’s not sure.

She finds out he does actually have a girlfriend. Her name is Padme Naberrie and she is either a figment of his imagination or actually a goddess in human form. She suspects for the longest time that he’s fucking with her and “Padme” is his equivalent to “my girlfriend, who is in Canada”.

(When she meets Padme for the first time, she is proven vastly wrong. Padme Naberrie is indeed a goddess in human form and so far out of dorky Anakin’s league its mind boggling. Anakin may have a six-pack, but he also un-ironically wears suspenders. And, yes, they’re often either Marvel comic suspenders or anime ones but even that speaks for itself. Padme Naberrie is laughably out of his league and yet madly in love with him. Strange world.)

The first time they’re actually alone together, like really alone, isn’t nearly as odd as she thought it would be. He drives her home when the bus system shuts down early due to snow, leaving her with no choice but to walk home in a thin coat. He ruffles her hair when he offers her a ride home and his car is probably older than she is but it runs and has heat, so whatever. She jokes that his car runs on hopes and dreams and he laughs at her and spends the rest of the ride telling her what a hassle the car was to fix up so it ran on anything but those things. It’s interesting and he’s a good teacher, a good tutor, and she comes away from the conversation with at least a small understanding of some car lingo. He gives her his cell number so she can call him to pick her up after school the next day to go to the library if she wants to.

(She’s 20 when she realizes that the real reason he gave her his number was to give her someone to call, someone who had a car, to come get her if things got bad at home. She can’t believe it took her so long to realize that.)

Her father doesn’t like her in the house but he doesn’t like not having her in the house either. He doesn’t like it when she has more freedom than what he gives her, more control of her own life than he’d like to give her. Sometimes he just screams at her and throws things in her direction and she prefers those times. At least if he’s screaming at her, she can ignore his words or pretend he doesn’t mean them.

Winter passes and on weekends they go to Panera instead of the library. They use their wi-fi and tradeoff who buys lunch. They don’t talk about their families but they do talk about their friends. Anakin has his girlfriend and one other close friend, named Obi-Wan, who do almost everything together. Obi-Wan is older than he is, by almost a decade, and apparently they met in a holding cell after they were both arrested at a protest. She’s not shocked by this at all. She tells him about her friends – Rex and Cody, who are brothers and in her grade. They’ve been friends since kindergarten; she sneaks into their house at night sometimes when she can’t bring herself to sleep at home. Barriss, who gave Ahsoka her first knife set and is always there if she needs someone to talk to. All three of them have given her various ‘don’t you think it’s weird that a college guy is hanging out with you???’ talks and she has told each of them to shut the fuck up and quit being gross.

She meets Padme in the summer. She and Anakin start the summer at the library, but since they both don’t have school, they eventually end up meeting wherever they want. She suggests they go to the public pool, because it’s nice out and her father is so cheap they can’t turn on the AC, and he says he’s bringing Padme and she’s skeptical. Padme is, as said earlier, an actual goddess. She’s gorgeous, graceful, has a breathtaking smile, and actually brings enough sunscreen for all three of them. And lunch! Ahsoka wears a one piece suit that covers the worst of the bruises on her back and sides while Padme wears a bikini that shows off her stomach and back.

“Believe me now?” Is all Anakin says to her and she responds with something that sounds close to:

“Ughnshjoou.”

Anakin beats her at a race and then they’re both beaten by Padme, who leaves them so far behind she might as well have a tail. Summer is spent at the pool mostly, swimming and tanning, and eating whatever Padme brings or packs for Anakin on the days she doesn’t come with.

(Summer means more work hours to be picked up, more time spent out of the house. Summer means her father works four and a half days out of the week instead of the standard five. And usually she ends up working herself to the bone to stay away from her house, ends up in a cycle of work, sleep, work, sleep just to stay as safe as she can be. But this summer she doesn’t have to do that.)

She goes to their apartment for fireworks and food for the fourth of July. It’s a small space, nice and cozy for them, one bedroom one bath with a large living room. She meets Obi-Wan and finds that she likes him just as much as she likes Padme and Anakin. Obi-Wan has a dry sense of humor and a sarcastic streak that matches hers and he doesn’t talk to her in a way that makes her feel childish. She expected him to, what with him being so much older than her, but he talks to her the same way Anakin does, like they’re on equal footing. She also finds out they have the same taste in movies, which is awesome, because Anakin can’t stand Spaghetti Westerns and Ahsoka thinks that’s a crime against good taste everywhere.

They all watch Independence Day and cheer at the cheesy situations and throw popcorn at the more dramatically embarrassing moments. Padme cuddles into Anakin’s side and they look so ridiculously happy just sitting there it’s a little nauseating. But nice too.

Her father breaks two of her fingers a few days before her sophomore year and she punches him so hard she breaks his nose. She flees.

It’s two in the morning when she knocks on Anakin and Padme’s door, her hand throbbing and shaking, exhausted from running across town. Padme answers the door in a dressing gown, because she actually wears those, and tugs her inside. Anakin looks at her hand and sets her fingers himself. She cries or maybe she just hasn’t stopped, she’s not sure. He binds her fingers so they set correctly and gives her some over the counter pain meds, telling her to try to get some sleep, but to come get them if the pain is too much. He doesn’t have to tell her that he’ll have to take her to the ER in that case, it’s pretty obvious.

(She’s been to both of the local emergency rooms often enough that she can tell when a TV show about hospitals does something wrong about them. It’s good for trivia but not much else. Whoever said that the more times you go to the ER as a kid, the higher the change of getting out of your abusive household was either an optimist or an outright liar.)

She sleeps on their couch that night and when she wakes up Anakin makes them pancakes. Padme wants to ask her questions, Ahsoka can tell, but Anakin doesn’t bother asking her anything. He sets a plate in front of her and passes her the syrup when she asks, chides her about eating with her mouth open, and says he can take her to school whenever she’s ready. She loves him so much for it she has to stare at her lap as she eats or start crying again.

Barriss and her get into a huge fight when school starts. It starts over something stupid and by the end of it Barriss accuses Ahsoka of sleeping with Anakin and Ahsoka lunges at her. Cody tries to pull them apart and gets kicked in the face for the trouble. She gets suspended and stares at the notice in her hand in the parking lot, waiting for her father, who the school called, at work, and is now taking time off work to come get her.

She’s so scared she could throw up. Her fingers are still in splints, still healing, and she just lost one of her oldest friends over a stupid misunderstanding. Her father drives home in silence and she mentally catalogues where the closest knife is in the house for when they get home. He might actually really hurt her for this.

(The closest knife is the one hidden under the side table in the entryway. She taped it there herself one night not long after Barriss gave it to her. Barriss, who called her a whore and punched her in the stomach, and is responsible for Ahsoka needing to know where that knife is in the first place – truly, life is full of unexpected ironies.)

They get home and he has to go back to work immediately. She’s so thankful she throws up when she hears the car leave. Maybe things will be different, since she finally stood up for herself? She proved she’s not a child anymore, that she’ll hit back if hit, maybe this will mean change? Maybe when she banged out of here last night and didn’t come home, he worried about her and realized what he was doing was wrong? She’s sure he loves her, he just doesn’t always know what to do with her – raising a child is hard, after all, and she’s such a fuck up is it really any wonder that they don’t get along?

She’s talking to Rex when her father comes home for the night. He grabs her by the hair, yanking her back, and she drops the phone, yelling. He punches her in the face a few times, kicks her when she’s down, and finally takes off his belt to bring that down on her too. She screams at him, cussing him out as much as she begs him to stop. He yells about the hours lost at his job for having to pick her up, the fact that he had to tell his boss about her being suspended for fighting, and finishes it off with saying that she should have died with her mother.

He doesn’t scream it at her, doesn’t spit it out like he did when calling her a waste of space. It’s the first time she’s heard her father talk about her mother in years and the shock of hearing her name almost drowns out what he actually said. Almost.

Ahsoka lies on the ground, still and quiet, long after he’s left her room. She’s still on the ground when the police come to the door and she hears her father talk to them. She picks herself up off the ground, fumbling for her cell phone, and listens as her father tries to deny the police entrance to their house. No warrant, no probable cause, no entry. They insist they see her and he calls her out. She goes, feeling like she’s a puppet on strings being manipulated by a child with too little dexterity.

They ask her what happened to her face, she tells them she got suspended today for fighting. They look suspicious and her father shows them the notice from the school. They leave and she is at once relieved and furious with them, with herself, with Rex for calling them in the first place.

(“What I wouldn’t give for you to have died with Santeria.”)

She looks at her father and when he takes a step towards her, she runs back to her room, slamming the door behind her.

( _What I wouldn’t give for you to have died with Santeria_ )

She grabs her bag and leaves through the window. She shows up at Rex’s doorstep, furious with him for calling the police. He snaps that he was terrified she was being murdered by her father, forgive him for giving a shit, and drags her into the house to clean her up. Cody pulls out the fold away bed she uses when she hides there and she spends the night.

( _What I wouldn’t give…_ )

She’s on suspension for two weeks. The first three days she spends at Rex and Cody’s, up until their mother finally remembers she lives there and comes home to find Ahsoka in the kitchen in one of Cody’s old shirts and Rex’s sweatpants eating cereal. Needless to say, she’s kicked to the curb.

(“I do everything I can to support you two, give you a roof over your heads, and _this_ is how you respond?” She snapped at them both. Cody protested, tried to explain, but was cut off with: “I’m sorry, young lady, but I have to insist you get out of my house while I talk to my sons about proper supervision and manners.”

_What I wouldn’t give-_

She gathers her clothes and leaves in less than three minutes.)

She sneaks into her own house to grab fresh clothes and her crappy laptop and then she goes to Anakin and Padme’s. They’re not home when she gets there so she has to wait for them, sitting in front of their door and hoping they come back before her laptop dies. Padme comes home first and is delighted to see her, until she actually  _sees_  her, then she’s horrified.

“Padme, I’m fine! I just got into a fight, got my ass suspended, it looks much worse than it is.” She says to the older woman, once they’re inside and Padme is trying not to cry.

“Got into a fight?! Yeah, with who?”

Ahsoka doesn’t answer because she’s not stupid enough to force conversations she doesn’t want to have. Padme stares at her, furious and heartbroken, before she tugs Ahsoka into a hug. They’re the same height but it still feels like a mother’s embrace, half remembered. Padme strokes her hair and it feels nice, safe.

(She remembers her mother in small bursts in the dark: the feel of her arms holding Ahsoka up, the smell of warm sunlight after a rainstorm, the crooked smile that sometimes appears in a mirror. She knows what her mother looks like, has seen photos of her and old home videos, has recorded audio of her mother’s awful singing voice and it will never be enough.)

When Anakin comes home, they’re watching Disney movies over ice cream. Anakin kisses Padme in greeting and puts his hand on Ahsoka’s head, like she’s a much smaller child. He cooks them dinner and makes cupcakes after.

(She doesn’t know this part: When she goes to sleep that night, he leaves the apartment. Padme texts him ‘don’t kill him, the last thing we need is cps taking her’ and he goes to her house. He knocks on the door and introduces himself, pushes his way into her house, and closes the door behind him. Anakin has always been good with his hands and has always had rage just under his skin. And he has so little family left that he goes to great lengths to keep them safe. He and Padme can’t take her right then, they don’t have enough money at that exact moment, but they’re planners and soon they will. He just needs to put enough fear into her father for a little while, just a little while.)

Halfway through the year, Padme and Anakin move into a condo with Obi-Wan. It’s closer to her school and she’s always in and out of the place. One of the rooms is undeniably hers and she’s slow to move her clothes into the closet and dresser there, but eventually they do all end up there. Obi-Wan teaches her how to drive and takes her to get her learners permit, even though she doesn’t have regular access to a car at all. Padme asks her if she would be interested in helping out at her law firm and then she has a better job that pays ten dollars an hour. Anakin teachers her how to cook and bake, even teaches her how to properly frost a cake which is way harder than she thought it would be.

Summer comes around again and she can wear a two-piece bathing suit for the first time in years. Barriss isn’t there to help her pick one out, but Rex and Cody obediently let her model a few until she finds one that she likes. Anakin and her devise a series of hand signals for the sole purpose of teaming up to throw Padme into pools while Obi-Wan roars with laughter. Rex and Cody are frequent visitors and they all play video games in the living room, laughing and smacking each other with each victory or loss. Anakin kicks their asses every time they play Mario Kart and Padme is freakishly good at Katamari while Obi-Wan just smashes buttons until his characters do something.

She goes back to her father’s house sometimes. She doesn’t know why she keeps coming back, when it usually ends in him throwing things at her and screaming. He never lays a hand on her ever again, but that doesn’t stop the fear of it happening from getting to her. He cancels her cell phone and Anakin just adds her number to the family plan that they’re all on. Her father throws out all her posters and CDs and she gets a bunch of new ones for her birthday from Anakin, Padme, and Obi-Wan.

She comes back after soccer practice in her junior year and realizes that the room in her father’s house that used to be hers doesn’t have much of anything in it. All her clothes are at Anakin’s, all her decorations and music, her stereo, her knives, her art projects, her new laptop. She sits on the bed and looks around the room, wondering why she’s here. She can’t remember the last time she spent the night in this house.

She goes home.


End file.
